A long shot, to be sure:

California Rep. Dan Lungren will challenge Minority Leader John A. Boehner next week in a bid to dethrone the top Republican in the House, according to a letter distributed by Lungren’s office on Friday.

Lungren, who opens the note complimenting the Republican leader as “a good man” “of honor and intergrity,” casts his long-shot campaign against Boehner as a move to shake up the GOP “because I think our party is in trouble.

“If we don’t admit our difficulties and address them aggressively, we not only run the risk of becoming a permanent congressional minority but we will do a disservice to our nation,” Lungren says in the letter. “If we choose by inaction to ignore the real challenges we face, then paraphrazing President Reagan, we deserve to be relegated to the trash heap of history.”

Lungren parrots the complaints of the party’s activist base in the aftermath of last week’s election, asking, “‘Do the Republicans in Congress really understand the magnitude of what has happened?'”

I do wonder if the Congressional GOP really understands what happened – I worry they are thinking they can coast to victory in 2010 on an anti-Obama wave. While that might happen, we should work with the assumption that Obama will be a huge success and thus we’ll have to beat the Democrats with ideas and candidates. Only if the Congressional GOP maps out its program based upon the need for ideas and solutions with a mind towards re-convincing the American people we are worthy of their trust will we have a chance of winning. And I mean really winning – not just falling into power like the Democrats did on an anti-GOP wave.

Top to bottom, we need to reform the way we do business to get our party to be the party of responsibility, moral standards, solutions and core American ideals.

And it was for commemorative Obama plates.

The people who are so enthused about Obama are starting to disgust me. Never in my life did I ever think I’d see some of my fellow Americans acting so servile to a politician…this nauseating flattery really has to stop. Get off your knees, Obamaniacs!

John Hawkins makes a strong argument in favor of removing Senator Mitch McConnell from his Senate Minority Leader post, and that is part of a larger debate in the conservative movement about what moves we should make early on in our rebuilding process. My view? All Congressional GOP leaders should voluntarily step aside and allow new people to compete for their posts.

When you are the leaders of the losing team, propriety dictates a humble recognition that the failure, ultimately, rests in the leadership. Yeah, the cards were stacked against the GOP. Certainly, McCain didn’t run the ideal campaign. The MSM was in the tank for the Democratic party. On and on – there are plenty of mitigating circumstances. And they all amount to nothing – the GOP lost.

I didn’t hear a clarion call from the GOP as to just why we should elect GOPers to the House and Senate. I know we were low on money in a lot of respects, but I saw huge numbers of GOP ads attacking Congressional liberals…which is a fine thing to do, but you can’t beat something with nothing. You can’t just be against Congressional liberals (wise as that position is) you also have to be for something…and the GOP had a host of things to be for which a good, national campaign could have highlighted:

1. Oil and energy – the GOP made some good moves in this, but I never saw a comprehensive, national campaign to highlight just how bad the Democrats are on this issue and the common-sense solutions the GOP had in hand.

2. Taxation – no talk at all about how a variety of tax cuts could be used to stem the financial crisis and restore economic growth.

3. Corruption – Stevens should have been stripped of all his GOP privileges the moment he was convicted and every GOPer in America should have loudly called for his immediate resignation. Couple this with the Democrats continued coddling of people like William “Cold Cash” Jefferson and the GOP could have made fighting corruption an issue for the GOP.

4. Spending – Why didn’t we pledge ourselves to fiscal responsibility? A “we learned our lesson” campaign could have at least started returning GOP favorability in matters of spending.

Others can probably thing of many more things we could have used to go on offense – but all I perceive from the GOP in 2008, as in 2006, is a determination to limit losses…in other words, to not lose as badly as we could. Douglas MacArthur was asked what his formula was for defensive warfare – his one word answer, “defeat”. You can’t win unless you attack – and we didn’t lunge after Democratic vulnerabilities.

It might have been that the ultimate course for 2008 was GOP defeat – perhaps the anti-GOP headwinds really were too strong to overcome by even the best candidate and the best campaign. So be it – but you go into any battle with the absolute conviction of total victory and fight like heck from start to finish. We didn’t do that – our leadership didn’t do that; and it is time for them to go.

Congratulations to our friends in India:

India marked its presence on Moon on Friday night to be only the fourth nation to scale this historic milestone after a Moon Impact Probe with the national tri-colour painted successfully landed on the lunar surface after being detached from unmanned spacecraft Chandrayaan-1.

Joining the US, the erstwhile Soviet Union and the European Union, the 35-kg Moon Impact Probe (MIP) hit the moon exactly at 8.31 PM, about 25 minutes after the probe instrument descended from the satellite in what ISRO described as a “perfect operation”.

Miniature Indian flags painted on four sides of the MIP signalled the country’s symbolic entry into moon to coincide with the birth anniversary of the country’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, observed as Children’s Day.

A remarkable achievement for a nation which 61 years ago emerged from British colonial rule as an impoverished, strife ridden global backwater. The Big Three in 2100 will be the United States, China and India, and the world had better get entirely used to the eclipse of Europe and the rise of the new great powers.

Democrats – and a few RINOs – start lining up for funds to cover their own stupid governing mistakes:

Three big city mayors asked the federal government Friday to use a portion of the $700 billion financial bailout to assist struggling cities.

The mayors sought help with their pension costs, infrastructure investment and cash-flow problems stemming from the global financial crisis.

The mayors—Michael Nutter of Philadelphia, Shirley Franklin of Atlanta and Phil Gordon of Phoenix—made their request in a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

Nutter said cities are facing an economic crisis not seen since the Depression and need help just like financial institutions.

“I want to make sure that cities and metro areas are at the table, that their voices are being heard, that our challenges and problems are well understood, so that we can get relief,” Nutter said.

The big cities – even when they have a supposed Republican Mayor – are generally governed under the core liberal principle that you can spend forever, raise taxes like there’s no tomorrow and issue bonds like they’re going out of style and none of these chickens will come home to roost. After all, to the liberals, the money supply is endless and there’s no level of taxation, spending and regulation which will ever discourage business and/or convince those who can leave that the ‘burbs are a better option. After having spent themselves into oblivion (Philly, for instance, has three departments for housing issues – among a list of city agencies large enough to run the British Empire at its height), these useless and all too often corrupt big city leaders now want you, dear taxpayer, to bail them out. And Obama has encouraged this by saying he wants an element of bail out for profligate liberals in his government.

Get ready for the most recession-inducing and -deepening government free for all in human history, boys and girls: the Democrats are back in power and anyone who actually thought they’d show fiscal restraint and, indeed, common sense just hasn’t been paying attention for the past 40 years.

The US Bishops refuse to back down:

e U.S. Catholic bishops have come out in a united front in a statement on abortion and politics, warning politicians not to misinterpret the election results as “a referendum on abortion,” and that “aggressively pro-abortion policies, legislation and executive orders will permanently alienate tens of millions of Americans.”

Cardinal Francis George, writing on behalf of all the U.S. bishops, begins his statement by heralding the historic election of Barack Obama as president and saying that the bishops look forward to working “for the common good of all” with the new government.

After listing priorities such as immigration, education, health care and religious freedom, the bishops state that the “fundamental good is life itself, a gift from God and our parents.”

Yet, they note that, “Legal protection for those members of the human family waiting to be born in this country was removed when the Supreme Court decided Roe vs. Wade in 1973. This was bad law.”

Of particular concern, the bishops say, is that “a bad court decision will be enshrined in bad legislation that is more radical than the 1973 Supreme Court decision itself,” referring to the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA).se

The Act would “outlaw any ‘interference’ in providing abortion at will. It would deprive the American people in all fifty states of the freedom they now have to enact modest restraints and regulations on the abortion industry,” according to the U.S. prelates.

We’ll swiftly find out how smart Obama really is – if he tries to ram through a series of leftwing programs, he’ll likely set himself up for a Clintonesque Congressional defeat in 2010. The fraudulently named “Freedom of Choice Act” (which actually takes away the choices of the American people) is a litmus test of the kook left, and Obama embraced it early on, but then he went and flip flopped on a host of issues, and might realize that FOCA is a losing issue. In addition to this in the the leftwing wish-list is “Card Check” (taking away the right of workers to vote on unionization), “Fairness Doctrine” (an attempt to get rid of Rush and the rest of conservative talk radio) and various criminal investigations of the Bush Administration the left has it’s heart set on. Any one of these, singly or in combination, would be political suicide – the only worse thing Obama could do for himself is to also try a gun ban of some sort. A smart Obama will make noises about these issues and then place them firmly on the back burner.

It should be kept in mind that 2002 was an strange event – the White House party gaining seats in the mid terms is almost unheard of. All else being equal, the Democrats can probably look to a 15-20 seat House loss right out the gate. Can Obama turn this around and duplicate Bush’s 2002 effort? Perhaps – but only if there’s a major turn around in the economy and/or the GOP really screws up badly (and never count us out on that – we’re not called “the stupid party” for nothing, ya know?). The Good news for Obama and his Democrats is that they built themselves a nice cushion in 2008 – the Senate looks entirely out of GOP reach any time before 2012 (when the first of all those new Democrats from 2006 come up for re-election, thus giving the GOP a good shot at significant gains), but if Obama makes people mad enough and adds to it a sluggish or recessionary economy, then 2010 could wind up being a GOP blowout. No need to fan the flames by giving the GOP a series of excellent wedge issues to hammer the Democrats with.

Of course, the GOP will also need to come up with a plan of action and a serious effort to act anew and think anew – can’t beat something with nothing. But in this rebuilding effort, the strong statement from the Catholic Bishops becomes a vital pivot point for the GOP – not a quixotic battle against Roe (out of reach until we recapture the White House, at the earliest), but a battle for the rights of the people. The people have passed – directly or through their State legislatures – various common sense restrictions on abortion, and the left – via FOCA – wants to undo all that and force abortion on demand back down America’s throat. People are wary of anything smacking of a ban on abortion, but they are even more wary of the usurpation of their rights.

We can do no better than relaunching ourselves on the side of Life and Liberty – core American values, core conservative values, and issues we simply blow the Democrats out of the water with.

Always a bad sign for a Congresscritter when he has to deny he’s under investigation:

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said he’s not a target in a Justice Department [investigation] of Countrywide Financial.

NBC News recently reported that the FBI is investigating Countrywide’s VIP program – which gave special mortgage deals to government officials.

Conrad was among those officials who received a mortgage.

The senator told WDAY Radio News that neither he nor his office have been contracted by federal investigators.

The Senate Ethics Committee is investigating Conrad’s relationship with Countrywide, and Conrad has denied he ever received preferential treatment.

The other Democrat on the chopping block here is Senator Chris Dodd (D-Bailout Package) – but there are others, and one of the first tests of the Obama Justice Department will be on whether or not they are prepared to see a fairly large number of Democrats brought down by this scandal. My bet is that its a test Obama will fail miserably, given the Democrats’ penchant for simply not caring about corruption unless they can tag a Republican with it at election time.

From NRO’s The Corner:

Here’s a stat from my friend, blogger Mark Perry: Total compensation per hour for the big-three carmakers is $73.20. That’s a 52 percent differential from Toyota’s (Detroit South) $48 compensation (wages + health and retirement benefits). In fact, the oversized UAW-driven pay package for Detroit is 132 percent higher than that of the entire manufacturing sector of the U.S., which comes in at $31.59.

I don’t care how much money Congress throws at GM. With that kind of oversized comp-package they are not gonna be competitive. It’s throwin’ bad money after a bad cause. What a way to start the new Obama era.

I’m finding less and less arguments in favor of keeping the Federal Reserve and not going back on the gold standard…

One thing this whole financial mess has demonstrated conclusively is that politicians and corporate executives are entirely too pin headed to run an economy. The twits are asking us to trust them, again, because this time they’ll use our money wisely…promise! Here’s a concept – why do we need a “big three” set of automakers? Why can’t there be a dozen regional automakers competing fiercely for our dollars? What is the purpose of the United Auto Workers other than for employment of corrupt union bosses and donations for corrupt Democrat politicians? Anyone seriously think that if the UAW is dissolved that people will have to go back to working 12 hours a day for a dollar?

I’ve become the sworn enemy of Big Government and Big Corporation – no more of this archaic “what’s good for GM is good for America” nonsense…and neither is there any sense involved in thinking that some government hack in DC can figure out what we need in our States and communities. Any of you pinkos out there want to join me in this, I’ll welcome you with open arms – we’ll part company on a lot of issues, but if you wish to war on government and corporations, then I’m your ally.

It is high time we stopped allowing this sort of idiocy – a free man (or woman) owning his own property and able to look after himself and his family, that is what we are supposed to shoot for. We have to encourage useful things – growing stuff, making products, digging materials out of the ground. One man starting up a small manufacturing business in a depressed neighborhood is worth a dozen Ivy League economists trying to convince Obama that government can actually do something worthwhile in the economy. Think about it – did Henry Ford start out as a major multinational corporate boss? Heck no – he started out very small and worked his way up. Now it might be time for his company to bite the dust, and allow some modern day Henry Ford to work it out anew and figure out an even better way to get cheap transportation into the hands of the average American.

America has been buried under and avalanche of corporate and socialist garbage for nearly a century now – time to bring it to an end.

…its now OK to report on the stunning victory we’ve achieved in Iraq:

Sunnis and Shi’ites made an emotional reach across the sectarian divide on Tuesday, reopening a Baghdad bridge between the two communities closed since a 2005 stampede, the deadliest incident of the war.

The Bridge of the Imams connects the Adhamiya and Kadhimiya neighborhoods of Baghdad, named for mediaeval Sunni and Shi’ite holy men whose landmark shrines on opposite sides of the Tigris are surrounded by homes of members of the separate communities.

It had been closed since 2005 when rumors of a suicide bombing panicked thousands of Shi’ites crossing the bridge for a pilgrimage to the Kadhimiya shrine. About one thousand people died in that stampede, clogging the river below with corpses.

But on Tuesday Sunni children from Adhamiya raced to see their Shi’ite friends in Kadhimiya. Women from the two communities met up on the bridge, kissing and hugging each other with joy.

“When the faces met, the lips smiled, hands shook, bodies hugged, the tears flowed out of joy. This is the Iraqi citizen,” said Sheikh Ahmed al-Samaraie, head of Iraq’s Sunni Endowment, which runs Sunni religious offices and mosques in Iraq.

A banner across the bridge read: “The bridge of love and reconciliation between the people of Adhamiya and Kadhimiya.”

God bless them all – and my fondest wish for the people of Iraq to at last have peace, and for our glorious troops to come home to a people who can never show enough gratitude for the quest they have so nobly completed for our nation. And kudos, also, to those in American who never doubted, never wavered – who kept faith with those who fight freedom’s battles.

It is just a pity we had to wade through years of anti-American sh** for us to reach this magnificent conclusion. There are plenty of people who should feel nothing but shame for the disgraceful role they’ve played.

The very long fuse of the Catholic Church has finally gone off over this criminal enterprise:

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) has not yet been able to determine if grants made to ACORN were used for fraudulent voter registration, but has cut off all funding to the community organizing group, Bishop Robert Morin announced on Tuesday.

Shortly after addressing the full assembly of U.S. Catholic bishops, Bishop Morin spoke to reporters about what the bishops had learned concerning the use of grants from the CCHD to the group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which is currently under investigation in 13 states for voter fraud.

CCHD originally announced in July 2008 that it was suspending funding to ACORN because of the embezzlement of 1 million dollars by the brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke. Today, however, the Bishop Morin went one step further and announced the cancelation of all funding to the group.

The Catholic Church will work with just about anyone if there’s a chance the poor will be helped – recognizing the truth that we all fall very far short of the perfection God desires for us, its not time to stand on ceremony when a sinner offers to help out. But there is a limit, and ACORN has at least reached it. Hopefully the good people in ACORN will start to realize that they’ve been taken for a ride by a group dedicated to fraud and a leftist political ideology which is at war with all morality.